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When Alexei was in failing health.... fifty-nine years after his death had been recorded in the history books... he told his wife from his deathbed that it was too late for him to tell his story and so it was now up to her.  She has made her husband's dying wish her life's work ever since then.

In 1979 Mrs. Romanov obtained copyright protection to prepare for the time when people would actually believe the tale and come to her looking for answers.  Since then, she has spent much of her time finishing her late husband's fantastic story in longhand, now made ready for that moment when publishers come knocking on her door.  A small number of the early pages were written by Alexei himself.

During all of the time that Alexei was living his secret life, the woman who was rumoured to be his sister was enduring a gruelling public battle with those who tried to denounce her claim.  That fight lasted until her death from a stroke on February 12, 1984.  In early October 1994 Dr. Peter Gill announced in a London news conference that analysis of Anna Anderson's DNA samples did not match the results from the remains of the Imperial family that had been found in the Koptyaki forest. 

A detective hired during the 1920's by the Grand Duke Hesse had first proposed that Anderson was in fact a Polish munitions factory worker named Franzisca Schanzkowska.  Additional tests found that Anderson's DNA profile matched the samples that had been donated by Schanzkowska's great nephew, supporting the theory that Anderson's true identity was that of the Polish woman who disappeared from a hospital in 1920 after being injured in an explosion at the factory.

Three different groups did tests on samples of tissue alleged to have come from Anna Anderson.  Dr. Gill used a tissue sample which came from bowel surgery that was performed in a Charlottesville, Virginia hospital in August 1979.  Dr. Mark Stoneking at Pennsylvania State University did tests on half a dozen strands of hair from an envelope that was found in a book that belonged to Anderson's husband, Jack Manahan.  In Germany, Dr. Bernd Herrmann of  Göttingen University found DNA on a 1951 blood slide. 

All three tests failed to match the results from the Russian remains... but the tests on the German sample did not match the other two. This fact either raises doubts about the source of the slide sample or it gives us reason, once again, to doubt the reliability of DNA as a method for identifying possible survivors of the 1918 murder of the Russian Royals.

Alexei told his wife that he had seen Anna Anderson from a distance while visiting Germany in 1931 and had insisted that she was not his sister.  Hoping to provoke a response, he once wrote to the German court in Hamburg that was hearing Anna Anderson's case to say that she did not look the least bit like the Anastasia he remembered. 

©  J. Kendrick 1997                                                                                                                                      (Continued on page 35)